Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Birdseye

In the routines of everyday life we often take things for
granted. We are blinded to the eccentricities and oddities of the familiar
simply because of the preconception of so-called reality that is created in our
mind’s eye—an image that, by the way, it’s often hard to shake. In her review
of Mark Kurlansky’s Birdseye, The Adventures of a Curious Man, Janet Maslin comments about the author’s
subject, “The oxymoron ‘fresh frozen’ would
be nowhere without him.” (“The Inventor Who Put Frozen Peas on Our Tables,” NYT 4/25/2012). There are other wonderful locutions that Maslin quotes
from Kurlansky’s book or that the book inspires in the reviewer. Here's a graph
that combines both. “His philosophy of vegetable consumption, promoting
agribusiness over local farming, is at least a talking point for being so
unfashionable. Birdseye, Mr. Kurlansky writes, thought like ‘a foodie in
reverse.’” Later Maslin quotes Kurlansky saying, “when Birdseye found something
in nature, he always wondered what it would taste like and what would be the
best way to cook it.” If Birdseye were alive now, he would be considered
politically incorrect. One could imagine him as a right wing radio shock jock,
but in his time he was an inventor and entrepreneur who embodied the essence of
American innovativeness and ingenuity. One wonders what a character like
Birdseye would have thought about the inhumane conditions under which animals
today are raised and slaughtered that Miyan Park and Peter Singer describe in
their essay “The Globalization of Animal Welfare,” in the March/April edition
of Foreign Affairs.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.